SKU: HL.48025440

ISBN 9781784549060. UPC: 196288216391.

Leokadiya Kashperova (1872–1940), hitherto consigned to a footnote in musical history as Stravinsky's piano teacher, is undergoing rediscovery. A double graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, she emerged as a virtuoso pianist and composer in the romantic tradition. She was associated with some of the great musicians of her day, including Balakirev and Auer. She performed in both Germany and the UK in the 1900s, but her career petered out after 1920. The Piano Concerto (1900) is Kashperova's earliest surviving orchestral work, and it was premiered by the composer the following year in Moscow and St Petersburg, bringing her much wider recognition and paving the way for an international career. Cast in three movements and in a Romantic idiom, pianistic virtuosity is often channelled into the pianist's left hand, which is required to negotiate widely-spaced 'extreme' arpeggios – awkwardly angular when adagio, fiendishly technical when molto allegro. Kashperova's orchestral colours are achieved by felicitous solos for the woodwind, horns and brass. Noteworthy, too, are unexpected glimpses of chamber music when, in the last movement for example, the piano combines fleetingly with solo violin and solo cello in passages. The concerto's quick music (Molto allegro and Allegro con anima) admirably portrays the vivacious personality of their composer, described in 1906 as offering those around her 'an abundance of joy, excitement and fun'. The central movement, by contrast, is a tender Adagio which offers the listener a gem of musical poetry.

SKU: BR.PB-32032

ISBN 9790004215661. 6.5 x 9 inches.

Invaluable Glimpses Schumann's close collaboration with the David quartet, together with the valuable advice of his friend Mendelssohn Bartholdy, led the composer to make extensive changes to the Streichquartette op. 41 before publication in December 1842. The present edition is hence to be thought of as a critical Urtext edition; it offers in fact to those interested, an invaluable glimpse into Schumann's creative process and his striving for the final form of his string quartets. All the deletions, changes, and the original phrasing were carefully worked out in detail, restored, and editorially identified in the music text. A detailed preface giving the geneses of the works, as well as pages of the autograph score in facsimile, complement the edition. The parts are of course so configured in the reliable Breitkopf quality that the quartets can also be performed today in the traditional form. The present edition was also used for the Leipzig String Quartet's 2010 CD recording.

SKU: HL.14031827

ISBN 9788759871089. Danish-English.

Preface The three movements of the quartet may be perceived as three different expressions of an unstable core: an inherent unrest leads to frequent changes of direction. The first movement is full of dramatic contrasts: it is followed by a second movement, whose basic mood of meditative rest is challenged by occasional centrifugal utbursts, while the third movement takes the inherent conflicts to a higher level, contrasting material of introspective lyricism with excessively pathetic moods. The final way out is a retrograde one, (back) into the source: through a constant accelerando-diminuendo the piece disappears into a vanishing point. The into the source of the titlemay be visualized as a reversed fountain-action: the broad fan-like spread of the first movement, a more coherent-solid second movement, and finally - in the third movement - a return-run, ever more vehemently, like a suction into the spring itself ... The musical motifs are varied: there are traffic-situations (which I heard!) with stomping and machine-like rhythms in different, but simultaneous tempi, and there are more abstract upwards and downwards half-tone-scales, with changing accents, creating glimpses of melodies. INTO THE SOURCE, String Quartet No. 9, was composed on a double-commission from the Orion Quartet and the Vertavo Quartet. The premiere performances took places in Santa Fe in 2002 and in Oslo in 2003. Per Norgard.

SKU: AP.49095S

ISBN 9781470646011. UPC: 038081564371. English.

Camelot refers to an idyllic time and place, lost to lore and legend, but which continues on in the hearts, minds, and stories of so many. When our imagination and sense of adventure allow it, we return to Camelot, with its gallant knights of the Round Table, acts of chivalry, and even moments of magic! This exciting piece by Scott Watson---with its driving tempo, insistent rhythms, modal harmonies, and glimpses of beauty---musically transports the listener back to King Arthur's Camelot. (3:25) This title available in MakeMusic Cloud.

SKU: FG.55009-848-0

ISBN 979-0-55009-848-0.